Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues

Eleanor M. Albert: Our guest today is Ning Leng. Ning is an assistant professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University. She conducts research in comparative politics with a focus on political economy, authoritarian institutions, and Chinese politics and economy. Her first book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China (Cambridge University Press, 2025), reveals how the Chinese state solicits political services from companies, resulting in an unstable investment environment and unintended development outcomes. She is also conducting fieldwork for her second book on Chinese companies in South America. Before academic life, Leng was a management consultant in Chicago, specializing in strategies and operations.

Ning, we're so happy to have you here today.

Ning Leng: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Eleanor M. Albert: We are going to talk today about a collection of papers that you have been working on with co-authors that deal with a lot of evidence drawn from a survey project that you conducted in 10 different countries about China and the Global South. Before we talk about the range of topics that these papers dig into, I was curious if you could talk to us about what inspired the survey and how you came up with the selected countries in which the survey was administered. What inspired this large undertaking?

Ning Leng: Of course. Me and my co-authors, David Bowman at Johns Hopkins and Kerry Rattigan at Amherst, we met up last year, and then we were discussing how there are holes in the literature. We don't yet have a lot of systematic evidence about what people think about China and how people think about China. There are a lot of surveys such as the barometers that will show public opinion, low favorability towards China, but we don't know much beyond that. The three of us are interested in understanding the mechanisms driving public opinion towards China and how people think about China from different angles such as lending, investment projects, environment, et cetera. So we decided we'll launch a huge survey, and the three of us all have international interest in our research. Kerry and I both are working on China in Latin America, and David had a lot of experience about Southeast Asia, so we're like, "Let's do a three-region survey: Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America."

Eleanor M. Albert: That's incredible. What were the countries that you ended up picking?

Ning Leng: In South America we have four countries, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. In Africa we have Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. And then Southeast Asia, we have Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. We choose higher-income developing countries that are democracies because we realize that public democracies might think of China a little bit differently than public in autocracies, which is one thing we're interested in finding out, and middle-income countries are where China is interested in investment, lending, and environmental engagement.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's great. Speaking of this democracy component, in one of your papers you're looking to examine if there's a link between democratic backsliding and public opinion favorability towards China. Part of this paper takes on the idea of whether or not China is making the world safe for autocracy. Can you walk us through how you conceptualize democratic backsliding and the concept of authoritarian diffusion?

Ning Leng: Absolutely. So it's a very tricky thing to figure out what democratic backsliding is. So instead of trying to define it, and then give our respondents a concept, we decided to induce any feeling or anxiety towards democratic backsliding. We basically primed our respondents and say, “Here is an actual report by a Swedish research institute that says democratic backsliding is happening globally.” Then we ask the respondents once they're primed, "Do you think there's democratic backsliding in your home country?" So we simply primed them; however they define it, we'll take it.

After that experiment, we ask them about their views of China and the finding is surprising. The finding is actually that if a respondent believes that their country might be experiencing democratic backsliding, they’re more willing to cooperate with China across dimensions, economic dimensions, investment, lending, and the military, and political dimensions. That was a very surprising finding for us.

Eleanor M. Albert: Let's talk a little bit about these mechanisms at work, that shaped these opinions. Are there differences across how they viewed China? You just said that there wasn't across economics, politics, or military cooperation, but was there anything in the nitty-gritty that showed a difference? Was there a preference towards one field or another?

Ning Leng: They definitely prefer economic engagement with China more so than political or military engagement with China. This is one of the mechanisms that we find that is also unexpected. Thinking about democratic backsliding does not make people more or less believe that the world will be dominated by big autocracies. They prefer cooperation with China, not because they think they're betting on the right horse and they think China's going to dominate the world, but rather, thinking about democratic backsliding makes people more pragmatic about their country. In particular, they're more anxious about economic future of their country.

So [they’re] thinking about backsliding and then they expect [the] economy is going to go down. They start to think, "What kind of international engagement might help with our country's economy?" They think about China, solely from the perspective that China is one of the largest economies in this world. We realize this is the unexpected mechanism, and the implication is that, should China's economy continue to decline, or if China reduces its economic engagement globally, then the attraction of China would also fall.

Eleanor M. Albert: In some ways, China is seen more as an economic stabilizer for the country because it's through a domestic country's lens as opposed to thinking about China in a macro international political, ideological dimension.

Ning Leng: That's exactly right. We also find that being primed about democratic backsliding does not make respondents more or less prone to support authoritarianism. They really just become more pragmatic in the economic sense. One caveat I should note is that they don't differentiate China from the United States when it comes to cooperation. They're equally likely to engage with the United States because both are huge economies.

Eleanor M. Albert: Super interesting. So, a second paper explores views on China's leadership in the environmental and green technology space, but this is all in the context that China is also the world's largest polluter of greenhouse gas emissions. For starters, what does it mean for China to be viewed as a global leader?

Ning Leng: In this very paper, the leadership is viewed simply from messaging. This is another survey experiment; we gave respondents two separate messages. The treatment group gets a message that says, "China is the largest polluter in the world." The other treatment group gets the message that China has the biggest commitment to environmental preservation. What we find is that messaging really does work. 

For the respondents who see a message that says China's the biggest polluter, they're less likely to see China as an environmental leader. But if they see the opposite message, then they [think], "China is committing so much money into environmental preservation, then it is an environmental leader."

I think, eventually for China, they have to make sure that they're doing the right thing so that the positive message about China's environmental engagement will dominate in the international space. If their actions don't follow up, and the negative message about their pollution continues to spread, then they're going to lose the leadership position in public minds. The interesting thing about this paper is that we also notice this cascading or spillover effect. If a respondent considers China to be the leader in the international environmental space, they're more likely to see China also as a leader in other spaces such as the UN [United Nations] or IMF [International Monetary Fund]. Global leadership clearly has a contagious effect across different international spaces.

Eleanor M. Albert: I was curious to unpack a little bit more about this reputational spillover effect and how is it that China's environmental behavior, which I presume is both at home and within the context of international organizations, how does that translate into other areas?

Ning Leng: We don’t know the mechanism for sure. We didn’t discover that in this paper; we only found out that there is a spillover effect. I think what it comes down to is how believable or valid the Chinese messaging will be in the future. Should it want to retain its global leadership across all of the dimensions? Maybe one of the implications is in all of these dimensions, China really has to have some positive action to make their messages stand and to keep their global leadership position.

Eleanor M. Albert: You can't just have empty words; you have to have some action that validates what you're saying.

Ning Leng: Exactly.

Eleanor M. Albert: That makes sense. We talked a little bit about the comparison between views of China and views of the U[nited] S[tates] in regards to the first paper. I am curious how that translates into this context. Are there perceptions in some of these Global South countries where their perceptions of China as a global leader impacts their view of the international leadership of the United States?

Ning Leng: This survey, it wrapped up in July last year. Back then, we discovered that United States absolutely remains highly competitive in terms of public opinion view of U[nited] S[tates] as a global leader. In most of our surveys where it's about economic engagement and economic opportunities, respondents do not differentiate between China and the U[nited] S[tates]. They will see these two countries as equally important for their country to engage with. However, in all of the survey experiments where we gave respondents a negative message about China, we would match it with a negative message about the United States. Then one thing we realized is that the Global South public punish [the] United States less than China. When they see a negative messaging by the United States, they're more likely to discount negative information about the U[nited] S[tates]. China does not have that, let's say, luxury. So the U[nited] S[tates] in some sense has an upper hand, if we think about the punishment on its reputation—it has an upper hand over China.

The other interesting thing in terms of the U[nited] S[tates] and China is that even though economically the global public doesn't differentiate between these two countries, when it comes to military engagement and political engagement, which we measure as asking respondents, “Are you happy or willing to let your government receive political training from U.S. or Chinese parties?" In this political engagement, we noticed that across the board, the Global South public is more likely to support engagement with the United States, a little bit more than engagement with China.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. We're going to dig more into the foreign lending side of these papers now, and you and your co-authors are tackling this question of foreign debt and the preferences that Global South countries might have for which type of lenders they want to go to. So what is the lender landscape like today, as a baseline question? Who and what are the traditional lenders, and who are some of the newer actors in this space?

Ning Leng: In our 10 countries, with the exception of Kenya, most of the countries owe most of their debt to private lenders. This is measured in monetary amount and private lenders, by that I mean banks and bank conglomerates, private banks. They've been traditional lenders. They were always there. They're less visible, but they're one of the largest lenders.

The IMF and World Bank and other international organizations remain strong. They also, in terms of monetary value, are very important lenders. The United States government has been lending less in the past 10 to 20 years, but they also remain strong as a bilateral lender. China is the newcomer. China is the new lender, particularly when it comes to government-to-government lending and Chinese policy banks lending to developing countries. That's the current landscape. And we realized that our respondents actually are not entirely aware of this landscape. The IMF and World Bank are considered by our respondents, wrongfully, to be the largest lender to their country, while in fact it would be private banks.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's super interesting. In your study, you find that the public is really sensitive in particular to anything related to foreign debt that has sovereignty implications. Can you unpack what that means for us a little bit? Do loans typically have a component that touches on sovereignty infringement? How are these loans structured, and who are the lenders that are in this particular type of business?

Ning Leng: When we think about sovereignty, there are two dimensions to it. One is if the government has autonomy and authority over a certain territory—this is territory integrity. The other one is whether the government has autonomy to make domestic policy decisions—so two dimensions.

China and the IMF, World Bank, international organizations, let's say, are hurting sovereignty in different ways. [The] IMF and World Bank—we know a lot of their lending will have conditionality. They will say, "We're going to give you this money, but then you have to have policy changes, transparency, due diligence, good governance. You have to change how you govern your country." That trespasses or violates the domestic policymaking autonomy side of sovereignty.

China is the opposite. China does not usually have political conditionality, but when China gives out a loan, it could violate the other dimension of sovereignty, which is integrity of your territory. China could ask for collaterals and this will be natural resources, and sometimes land, as we see in Sri Lanka. So China versus IMF/World Bank might hurt a country's sovereignty in different ways.

In our survey experiment, we try to understand which kind of violation of sovereignty is the public more sensitive about. We realize the public is way more sensitive about their land or their natural resources serving as collateral to [an] international lender, and therefore, they do not prefer Chinese lending because of this component.

The other surprising thing is, how does the public view potential violation of policymaking at home, that dimension of sovereignty? We realized that actually the public is not as sensitive to this dimension of sovereignty as we had previously expected or as some research in the literature mentioned. In fact, some respondents even prefer policy conditionality. We suspect, we don't know for sure, but our hypothesis is because sometimes when the global public wants to push for good governance and they don't have the domestic channel, they prefer to have an international actor do it for them. So our respondents actually support political conditionality imposed by [the] IMF and World Bank.

This survey experiment came down to another surprising finding, which is, to this day, despite how much criticism that [the] IMF has received, [the] World Bank has received, the Global [South] public still prefers [the] IMF and World Bank to any other lender, and by far to China. China is the least favored lender to the Global [South] public, and they know a lot about Chinese lending practices.

Eleanor M. Albert: That is very surprising because there seems to be so much talk about how much lending China has been doing, and perhaps it's more taken on a role of a lender of last resort when there aren't other offers on the table. But very interesting about the IMF and World Bank.

I'm curious, though, in thinking about China, it seems to be experiencing a learning curve as an international lender. I think there was a while where it just had a lot of money and [thought], "We're going to do a lot of loans," and now economically the trajectory is trending downward. But there have also been a lot of accusations of debt trap diplomacy, and China itself has chosen to restructure some of its lending agreements. In that context, who are China's main lending entities? And with this change in the economic trajectory, do you think that China might change some of its lending practices moving forward?

Ning Leng: My personal view is China is already changing its lending practices, and it will continue to do so. I think there are two driving forces. One is related to China's capacity to lend. With [the] domestic economy continuing to decline, and right now, I personally, I do not see where the next economic growth point is for China. China is very restricted by how much it could lend overseas, particularly considering the high level of local debt. If China lends overseas, and it will have to explain to a domestic audience of why they're lending abroad rather than forgiving some of the loans at home. This is a very politically touchy issue for the Chinese government.

The second driving force, relatedly, China saw its previous debt and a lot of scholars have written about this, much of this debt, China simply cannot recoup the cost. Today, I don't think it's viable for China anymore to forgive all of this debt. They have to prevent making the same mistakes in the next wave of lending.

So I think China will change its lending practices starting with, and this behavior is already recorded by AidData at [the] College of William & Mary… In the past they do just bilateral lending, Chinese policy bank lending to another country, but now they prefer to lend along with other banks. They want to form a bank and conglomerate when it gives out loans to foreign countries. The second thing, I think, they will become very careful in what projects they lend to. If they cannot guarantee that they can recoup the cost from the project or get natural resources, collateral, I think China will be careful not to get into those loans.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. This ties well into transitioning to the fourth paper in this quartet that you and your co-authors had. This last project looks at whether individual project characteristics matter or whether the source of the project matters. China has become this major investor, backing a lot of projects in the Global South, and particularly in some of the medium-income countries that you guys surveyed. This is, of course, most visibly through China's Belt and Road Initiative. This last paper really is a study looking at how Chinese projects are perceived by the public. With that said, what drives the public opinion in these Global South countries towards Chinese projects? Do people care that it's China, or do people care that it's a road or a train station or train tracks? Are there characteristics of a certain project that are the driving factor?

Ning Leng: The Global [South] public definitely cares about project characteristics and they are in fact very knowledgeable about what an investment project means to them in terms of employment, environmental pollution, how it affects domestic governance. They care about these characteristics.

The findings are not surprising in that of course they prefer projects that will benefit them. The more jobs the project creates, the better; the better governance practice it brings, the better. The country effect here is weaker than the project characteristics. The global public just cares about a good project most of the time, rather than who is investing in this project.

But one caveat, as I mentioned earlier, is that if a project is bringing a negative impact on a country and somehow these negative impacts come from China, this project will get punished a little bit more, than say, if it's a negative impact project coming from the United States. There is the very, very minor difference here, subtle difference, in how the global public views the project. But in general, our finding is the Global [South] public is very pragmatic, and they are knowledgeable about economic engagement and they seek what is best for their country.

Eleanor M. Albert: So far we've talked about these four papers and at the core you're looking at how publics in developing countries view China and Chinese projects and Chinese financing and just a presence of China within their domestic context. How does this differ from the view of elites in the Global South in some of these countries? I think, oftentimes, publics have opinions, and in democratic countries, as theory tells us, there's generally a responsiveness by elites to the public about how they feel. But that might not always be the case. What have you found in terms of the differences among the elites in Global South countries and their publics and how they view China?

Ning Leng: Absolutely. My second book that I'm writing now is mostly about elites, both political elites and business elites, how they engage with China, how they change according to China or what they resist in terms of engagement with China. One thing I noticed from my own research is that elites do view China a little differently from the Global [South] public, as my co-author surveys are showing.

For one thing, elites seem to care more about the political dimension of engagement with China. They care way more about geopolitical security concerns. For example, my research is in South America, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. Elites in these countries do think more about their relationship with the United States when they engage with China. They are very careful about not offending both sides. And frankly, in South America, [the] United States is still that country that elites think they should focus on rather than China at this point.

Elites also think more about domestic political impacts that Chinese investment or Chinese trade could bring into the country. They think about governance, they think about regulatory environment, what changes Chinese companies are bringing into, do they necessarily welcome all of these changes? These are constant debates among the elites that I have met, which I have not captured in the Global [South] public opinion survey. In general, I would say both politics and security are bigger concerns for elites than the public it seems.

Eleanor M. Albert: A follow-up on that. In thinking about some of these countries being democracies, are there political party divides in terms of how they view China? Or perhaps on either end of a political spectrum, these considerations must matter. But I'm curious whether there are specific examples where there are different dividing lines say in South America vis-a-vis the U[nited] S[tates] and China.

Ning Leng: There is definitely a dividing line among the elites that I have interviewed.  It's more than two camps even, I would say. Some of the elites consider they're similar to how the public views China. It's all about economic engagement and economic engagement for these elites, probably also for the public, means that these countries can finally carve a path of its own. They don't need to depend on any single country when there are different great powers competing for their attention, so to speak. They welcome that very pragmatically.

There are a group of elites that are very concerned about particularly the concern for corruption. They think that the difference between, for example, Chinese companies and American companies is because in general, they believe Chinese companies will breed more corruption in their country. This is Latin America; we know they have suffered or experienced waves of corruption and anti-corruption campaigns. So they're very sensitive to that subject. They worry about good governance and in general, their business environment because what if corruption leads to a race to the bottom? That will be a second camp that's concerned.

And then the third camp is more again about geopolitical relationships. This camp is less sure about what engaging with China means for them internationally. Lots of trade-offs to make. What about their relationship with the United States and the West in general? So I see at least three camps when they think about China.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.